The fact that the King has returned to dust does make it hard to get him a birthday present, though. Clearly, the only option one has is a personal gesture of goodwill. To that end I will do my best to elucidate on a topic that I am sure still bothers him beyond the veil of death, bless his egotistical heart: the idea that he was ugly.

If there is one common misapprehension that Henry VIII would wish to debunk, it is probably the one wherein he was gross in every possible way. Heaven knows “modest” and “humble” were not adjectives used to describe him, so the fact his image in the public imagination is usually that of a fat and pus-oozing old lech must be making him spin in his grave.

When the King was young he was a prime bit of manflesh. The young Henry was described, in the private letters of more than one foreign ambassador or other court contemporary, as having incredible physical beauty. His hair was red-gold, he had very fair skin, and apparently his face was so lovely it would have looked good on “a pretty woman”. Not only that, he could sing. He was the teen heart-throb of the Tudor dynasty.

Measurements for his armor also show that Henry was well over six feet tall and had a godlike body. A man’s legs were an especially important feature for masculine beauty in those days, and Henry had a first-rate set of limbs. He was vain about them (as he was about everything), bragging that his legs “had a good calf”. The fashion of the time made much of a man’s lower body, and Henry certainly looked hot in a doublet and hose when he was young. Henry, with his long and muscular legs encased in the skin-tight hose that were topped with an enormous codpiece made of stiffened (insert own joke here) cloth and his broad chest covered in a gem-encrusted doublet, had to have been an impressive sight. I am sure most of the ladies of the court, and likely some of the guys as well, would admire Henry as he moved among them, resplendent as both a man and a king.

Henry’s body wasn’t just for show, either. The King was a very, very good athlete and demonstrated outstanding abilities in several medieval sports. He was a particularly good equestrian, and could ride for more than thirty miles without needing a break. Anyone who has ever ridden a horse can tell you that riding a horse is not a passive activity; your thigh and core muscles in particular have to be strong in order to keep your seat. He could also joust better than any of his court contemporaries, which was not an easy thing to do. (Contrary to rumor, Henry always lost games with good grace and people who could beat him would win significant sums of money — people did not “let” him win.) Jousting was an incredibly difficult and demanding sport that could easily lead to fatal injuries.

Moreover, the King was also extremely good at tennis. Back then tennis was played in an indoor court and used hard leather balls packed with wool, or even human hair, and was more like squash than tennis as we know it today. Modern tennis is certainly not a sedentary sport, but squash is even more physically demanding. Since Henry was recorded more than once stripping down to his shirt during physical exertion, I’m pretty sure the sight of sweat-soaked linen clinging to his muscular chest and back was one of the reasons people crowded around to watch him play.

Henry was also a skillful archer, and could shoot an arrow as well as most of the bowmen in his guard. These were longbows, people. You had to be built like a brick house just to nock the arrow on the string of the bow. The pull weight on those things was around 200 lbs. Although the average male height was around 5’8”, the archers whom Henry competed with were typically about 6’ 2” or 6’3” with thickened bones to compensate for the weight of their extra muscle mass.

Henry may have been vain, but to be frank he had a damn good reason for his vanity. No wonder he couldn’t quite believe that Anne Boleyn was serious when she told him that she only wanted to be his subject, not his mistress. As a personable, intelligent, and handsome king,“no” was probably not a word he encountered overmuch.

Now, let’s raise a symbolic toast to this amazing King in honor of his birthday. History may have been served by his obtaining more inner beauty, but let no one question the pulchritude of his exterior.

During the episode of The Tudors in which Anne Boleyn is executed, scenes of her suffering in the Tower are punctuated with the image of Henry, gazing contemplatively at two beautiful swans nuzzling in the pond outside the palace. His mood and thoughts are left deliberately ambiguous; perhaps, the viewer imagines, he is thinking back over his love for Anne and the life they shared together, perhaps he is having regrets, feeling sorrow for the beauty that is about to be lost? No. After the execution scene, we are immediately taken to the King at his table, looking forward to his breakfast, which is being brought to him in a large gilt tureen on a silver platter. The lid is lifted, and the servants and nobles surrounding Henry gasp and applaud in delight. There on the platter is one of the swans, roasted and decorated with its own beautiful wings, posed as gracefully as if it were still swimming in a lake. Henry, referencing Charles Laughton’s famous eating scene but giving Henry’s voraciousness a menace missing from Laughton’s comic depiction, tears off a wing, plunges his hand into the body of the swan, and begins eating, oblivious to the greasy drool spilling from his mouth.

Had Henry become the monster depicted in this scene?

The execution of a queen was unprecedented, extreme and shocking, even to Anne’s enemies. Henry had invested six years of time, energy, intellect, money, and blood in making the marriage happen. They were married less than three years. There is no evidence of an unbridgeable emotional estrangement between them. His earlier love letters to her, admittedly written in the bloom of fresh passion, portray a solicitous, tender suitor whom it is impossible to imagine coldly ordering a wife’s death. There are plenty of explanations for Henry’s desire for a new marriage–Anne’s failure to provide a male heir, Jane Seymour, waiting in the wings, fresh and fertile, Henry’s recognition that Anne was creating problems with his image. In the end, however, it still takes a leap of incomprehension to find any of them sufficient to explain Henry’s willingness—in fact, seeming eagerness—to sign the order for Anne’s execution. We are still left asking ourselves: How could he do it? What follows are six different “answers,” not all of them incompatible with each other, but all offering a slightly (and in one case radically) different “take” on one of the most notorious death decrees in history:

Suzannah Lipscomb: After a year of physical and emotional disasters, the wound to Henry’s masculine honor and the need to restore patriarchal authority was all-important:

“Two contemporary comments provide a clue [to Henry’s behavior]. Cranmer, in his letter to the king concerning his disbelief at Anne’s guilt, wrote that he could not ‘deny but your grace hath great causes…of lamentable heaviness; and also, that…your grace’s honour of every part is so highly touched’, before rushing on to undo these words by disingenuously assuring Henry, ‘if the reports of the Queen be true, they are only to her dishonor, not yours’. A similar sentiment was expressed by a European observer, the reformer Philipp Melancthon, when he wrote, ‘see how dreadfully this calamity will dishonor the King’. Honour, as we have seen, was chiefly a measure of one’s ability to conform to the ideals demanded of one’s gender. For a man, it meant exerting masculinity, imposing patriarchy, controlling the women in one’s household, maintaining a good reputation and demonstrating physical and sexual prowess. Chiefly, it meant controlling the morality of the women under his care and, specifically, their sexual morality. That henry had been unable to do this denoted two things: it was evidence of Henry’s inability as a man and as a monarch. Contemporary thought made a clear link between a man’s sexual potency and his wife’s fidelity – men who were cuckolded were those whose ‘lack of sexual dominance led their wives to adultery’. ‘To be a man’, writes Lyndal Roper, ‘was to have the power to take a woman.’ Anne’s very behavior, if assumed to be true, testified to the king’s lack of manliness, and as if this weren’t enough, Anne and Rochford’s ridicule of the king on this very matter drove the point home. It was not something that went unnoticed in the kingdom. Sir Nicholas Porter, the parson of Freshwater, was reported to have said in 1538, ‘Lo, while the King and his Council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made cuckold at home.’ There was also a strong connection in the popular mind betw4en impotency and old age – the image of ‘Old Adam’ whose feeble old body could not satisfy his vigorous young wife was a constant refrain in the ballads found in contemporary broadsides. There were huge repercussions if such a failure were found in a king. Early modern thinking linked the governance of a house with the governance of a realm; as John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote in 1612, ‘it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house’. Any woman’s adultery, but especially that of a queen, upset the social order and gender hierarchy upon which society was based. Cranmer was right the first time – Henry’s honour was ‘highly touched’ by Anne’s apparent adultery. This also explains why Henry felt the need to cavort himself with ladies and increase the pace of his relationship with Jane Seymour, marrying her so quickly. It wasn’t just, as Alesius later hypothesized, that he was ‘openly insulting’ Anne: in the light of Anne’s devastating assault on his masculinity, Henry did it to restore the patriarchal order and to prove his manhood.”

(From 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII, p. 88-89)

Alison Weir: Henry VIII, ready to believe anything about a woman he had come to see as a monster, found the charges against Anne entirely credible:

“From the time of Anne’s committal to the Tower, Henry VIII’s behavior was typical of a man confronted with appalling evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and whose masculine pride has been deeply wounded. He avoided parading his humiliation in public, and remained incommunicado until all was over. Henry was apparently ready to believe anything of Anne. He would shortly manifest the conviction that she was a monster not only of lechery but also of cruelty. The latter was, to him, probably entirely credible. She had hounded Wolsey night until death; repeatedly urged henry to send Katherine of Aragon and Mary, his own daughter, to the scaffold; been ruthless against her enemies. Five years earlier, rumor had placed her faction behind an attempt to poison John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and out-spoken and upright opponent of the Boleyns; and only a couple of months ago it was bruited that Katherine of Aragon had been poisoned, and that Anne was the culprit. Now it appeared she had plotted to do away with the King himself, her own husband. That certainly gave Henry a jolt, and his imagination began to run riot. When his bastard son, the seventeen-year-old Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond, came on the evening of May 2 to receive his father’s blessing before retiring for the night, “the King began to weep, saying that he and his sister {Lady Mary} were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them. These tears were the only ones Henry is known to have shed in connection with Anne Boleyn’s fall, while his tirade betrayed his conviction that she was guilty of far worse than adultery, and the sharp-minded Chapuys picked upon this: “From these words, it would appear the King knows something about it.”

(From The Lady in the Tower, pgs. 150-151)

G. W. Bernard: Lancelot de Carles’ poetic account of remarks by the Duchess of Worcester, combined with Anne’s outrageously flirtatious behavior, strongly suggest that Anne was indeed guilty of at least one adultery:

“Also just possible, of course, is that everything we have considered was no more than a series of misunderstandings in response to ‘unguarded speech and gossip’, ‘a lot of smoke but precious little fire’. After Anne, in the Tower, told Kingston about Mark Smeaton, her mother rebuked her: ‘such desire as you have had to such tales has brought you to this’. It is just about possible that the countess of Worcester had herself read too much into what she thought she had seen, not just in the case of Anne’s brother, but of all she spoke of. It is also just about possible that Anne’s burblings in the Tower could be innocently explained away – but, crucially, that what henry learned was amply sufficient to make him, reluctantly but reasonably, conclude that, alas, it was all true and then seek furiously to deal with those who had wronged him. Was it that, although there was no evidence that Anne was guilty, enough had been said to make Henry understandably and sincerely believe that she was? Yet the countess of Worcester was in absolutely no doubt about Anne’s behavior – and she was in a very good position to know the truth. If what she said was wholly wrong, we should have to believe either that she deliberately invented the charges she brought against Anne or that she utterly mistook what Anne was, and was not, doing in her chamber. It is far more plausible that the countess was not totally wrong and that if, perhaps, she read too much into George Boleyn’s visits to his sister’s chamber, there was still a good deal of truth in what she declared about Anne’s behaviour. And so it remains my own hunch that Anne had indeed committed adultery with Norris, probably with Smeaton, possibly with Weston, and was then the victim of the most appalling bad luck when the countess of Worcester, one of her trusted ladies, contrived in a moment of irritation with her brother to trigger the devastating chain of events that led inexorably to Anne’s downfall.”

(From Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions, pgs. 191-192)

4. Michael Hirst (creator of The Tudors): Anne’s failure to produce an heir was not just a blow to the security of the Tudor line but a sign that the hope that Henry had built his entire life around was based on an illusion- that he had spent years of his life, shed the blood of friends, and broken with the church of his childhood, only to be proved mistaken in the supposition that this was what God wanted of him:

“He had attacked the church on the basis of a love affair, largely. But he felt sure of what he was doing at the time, and Anne had mistaken promised him a son. After she’d given him a daughter and had the miscarriages, it began to seem to him as though he’d gone horribly wrong. He was plunged back into reality, which is messy and not perfect. And I think that as he confronted the huge seriousness of it, he began to think in weird ways, that she was a witch and so forth. This of course, shows how juvenile he still was. And he did have an absolutely ruthless streak which his father, too, had possessed. But beyond that, he did suffer a severe psychological crisis, knowing he had been so deluded. He came out of that crisis a much worse person, a complete tyrant and monster, who killed off the best part of himself in the attempt to reconcile his psychological issues.”

(From a personal interview with Susan Bordo)

Kyra Kramer: Henry was suffering from a genetic disorder that radically altered his mental state as he grew older, resulting in more and more erratic and irrational behavior.

“Who in their right mind would stalk a woman until she gave in and dated him, wait several years to marry her and be allowed to consummate the relationship, rip a country apart and declare his own daughter a bastard in order to keep his new bride, and then kill that same beloved woman just a few years after saying “I do”? No one, that’s who.

Well, no one in his or her right mind that is.

According to a theory put forth by Dr. Catrina Banks Whitley and myself, Henry VIII was not actually in his right mind when he had Anne Boleyn legally murdered. The theory postulates that Henry had a Kell positive blood type concurrent with McLeod syndrome, resulting in reproductive losses and an altered mental state in his forties.

McLeod syndrome can only be manifested in people, who are thus far always men, with a Kell positive blood type. (Before the medical specialists comment – yes, one can have K(K1) effecting pregnancies and the father still express McLeod syndrome because of variant Kell antigen expression: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6879675 ) Usually the symptoms of McLeod syndrome begin to appear near the patient’s fortieth birthday and grow progressively worse over time. Those symptoms can include physical issues, such as muscle and nerve deterioration, facial tics, malformed blood cells, and damage of the internal organs like the liver and the heart. The disease is also often expressed by an erosion of mental stability, wherein the patient becomes more and more irrational and erratic.

There is a plethora of evidence to show how Henry’s personality and mental processes changed in the 1530s, which I have room to explicate more fully in my book, Blood Will Tell, but you’ll have to trust me on for now. The kinds of psychopathology exhibited by patients with McLeod syndrome include, but are not limited to, deterioration of memory and executive functions, paranoia, depression, socially inappropriate conduct, and can even get so bad that it mimics schizophrenia-like behaviors. In severe cases, “schizophrenia-like symptoms” of personality changes can be the “prominent initial clinical manifestation” of McLeod syndrome. This abrupt mental change would explain why Henry started his reign as a puissant prince but ended it as a pestilent putz.

Moreover, the timing fits McLeod syndrome like a glove. Henry turned forty in the summer of 1531, and shortly thereafter his treatment of Queen Katherina turned much harsher. For the first couple of years she was the only victim. By the time he was forty-four the King’s personality alterations were becoming clearer in the most disturbing ways. In spite of his enduring reputation for tyranny, he only started wantonly killing people who disagreed with him in 1535, the year he beheaded Thomas More. Before that, getting him to agree to an execution was like pulling teeth. Cardinal Wolsey had a devil of a time getting him to execute even the Duke of Buckingham, who was blatantly gunning for Henry’s throne.

(While most people remember 1536 as the watershed year for Henry’s new fondness for the axe, because that is the year he beheaded Anne Boleyn, he actually started his killing spree in 1535. Incidentally, the bloodbath began several months before he fell and was knocked unconscious during a tournament in January of 1536. That means that the blow to the head may have exacerbated his symptoms, but the alteration in his personality had already started more than a year before. )

Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn neatly straddles the manifestation of his mental symptoms. The King started pursuing Anne in 1525 (maybe as early as 1524) and beheaded her in 1536. Prior to his fortieth birthday he is clearly her besotted swain, yet he was still trying to please everyone and let Katherina down gently (good luck with that, bub). After his fortieth birthday he becomes increasingly cruel to Katherina, and then murderous to anyone who disagrees with him, and then turns abruptly and viciously on the woman he had loved so dearly.

Personally, I happen to agree with Walker, and think Anne’s death was not caused by her miscarriage in January of 1536, but rather because she told a courtier that he wished for “dead men’s shoes” in April. That statement could be constructed as imagining the death of the King, which was treason. Her enemies, under Cromwell’s management, pounced on her slip of the tongue and convinced Henry she was plotting his death. A little torture of Mark Smeaton and his confession of adultery — voila, she is a whore and Cromwell can conveniently rid himself of some of her supporters.

Henry, having become paranoid and irrational due to McLeod syndrome, was easy prey to manipulation by Anne’s foes. Once he had signed off on his wife’s beheading, his imagination ran wild. Soon the King had convinced himself that Anne had been plotting to poison his older children and that she had slept with more than one hundred men. Rational people do not suspect a woman under the constant lack of privacy Anne faced to have had sex with one hundred men.

The man who killed Anne Boleyn was clearly not the same kind and gentle knight of his youth, and he would grow steadily worse after her death. Nowadays, most people only remember the villainous brutality of the last fifteen years of his reign, and have very little idea of the gentle and intelligent man the King was until the 1530’s. I really hope that one day his remains can be exhumed for DNA analysis. If he did have McLeod syndrome, perhaps people will forgive him for the crimes he committed as a result of an uncontrollable mental illness. If nothing else, I hope the evidence I present in my book will at least encourage people to see Henry VIII as the complex monarch he was, rather than an unmitigated monster.”

(Based on the arguments of Blood Will Tell.)

6. Susan Bordo: Henry’s resilience, emotional balance, and temper may indeed have degenerated as he got older, possibly exacerbated by genetic factors as well as the challenging events of 1536, but he was always a dangerously capricious personality:

“Henry was always a man of many faces, a “baffling composite of shifting silhouettes” (Lacey Baldwin Smith) who could be good-natured, generous and charming one moment and dangerously cold as stone the next, highly emotional yet rigidly stubborn, a genuine searcher of his conscience for “God’s will” yet able to subordinate all moral scruples and guilt to solidifying his own authority or satisfying his own desires. The combination of informal warmth and lethal self-interest meant that even the closest relationships with him were never on solid ground, always skating on thin ice. Thomas More, of all of Henry’s contemporaries, was most perceptive about the inherent danger of making too much of the King’s outward gestures of affection. He told Fisher that “the king has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favor.” It may have been a compliment, but it was also a warning. He told a young courtier—and this was in 1520, before any “crisis” had occurred in Henry’s reign—that having fun with the king was like “having fun with tamed lions—often it is harmless, but just as often there is the fear of harm. Often he roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the roar becomes fatal. The pleasure you get is not safe enough to relieve you of anxiety. For you it is a great pleasure. As for me, let my pleasure be less great—and safe” (Lion’s Court, p. 217).

But even More couldn’t remain safe. He realized, as he told his son in law Roper, that even when he was favored by the King “more singularly” than any subject in the realm, “I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head could win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” (Ridley, 188) In the end, Henry was just that cavalier with More’s life, although not over a castle in France. Henry had promised, years before, that he would always allow More to avoid any declarations or actions that went against his conscience. But when Henry’s own supremacy was at issue, More’s conscience—and his head—proved to be easily dispensed with. On the day of More’s execution, Henry went hunting in Reading. This was the way Henry dealt with all his executions of old friends and lovers: go hunting, have a party, be merry. Move on. He was shockingly capable of decisively and irrevocably turning off the switch of affection, love, tender feeling and shared memories, severing all ties, and refusing to look back.

In fact, those whom he loved the most—Wolsey, More, Anne, Cromwell–were most at risk. Because he loved them, they had the most power to disappoint him—and for Henry, disappointment could never be “slight.” All wounds to his authority, his manhood, his trust, were bloody gashes that he could only repair by annihilating (psychologically or literally) the one who inflicted the wound. This, perhaps, is what distinguishes Henry’s pattern from “ordinary” royal imperiousness. Kings execute people. Kings have grandiose ambitions. Kings are threatened by challenges to their authority. Kings can become drunk on power, and often do. But Henry may be unique among famous authoritarian kings in that his close relationships only had two switches: on and off. As Howard Brenton, author of the play Anne Boleyn, put it in an interview with me, “With Henry, you were either totally in or you were dead. He would have someone close to him, he’d elevate them, and they’d be terrific and virtually run everything on his behalf, and then when something went wrong, or a wind came his way, he would turn 180 degrees against them and they would be out. It happened to Wolsey, it happened to More, it happened to Anne, it happened to Cromwell.” It almost happened to Mary, who so enraged Henry when she refused, even after Anne was dead, to take the oath recognizing her father as Supreme Head of the Church of England, that Cranmer , at the last minute, had to talk him out of ordering her execution (Ridley, 274). Mary was Henry’s daughter.

And his will was capricious. The letters of ambassadors, even from the early years of his reign, describe sudden, explosive angers, “tears and tantrums.” In 1535, the king’s fool almost lost his life over a joke about Anne Boleyn; a year later, Henry was weeping uncontrollably while hugging his illegitimate son, relieved that he was now safe from “that accursed whore” who had slept with over a hundred men. A hundred? That would have meant a new man every ten days of her Queenship. Yet it’s possible that Henry believed something near to this, for his emotional switch, for whatever reasons, had turned against her, and she was now as wholly evil in his eyes as she once was wholly virtuous.

Whatever the origins of Henry’s personality, his problems were vastly exacerbated by the fact that he was, after all, king. As such, he was continually flattered and pampered, his every whim indulged, his grandiosity rarely challenged, his illusions carefully maintained. All of this encouraged his sense of omnipotence, which in turn made it all the riskier for those around him to show anything less than absolute allegiance. In proving this, even obedience, ironically, put one at risk, for Henry wasn’t a fool; he knew those around him were afraid, and so never fully trusted anyone. When he was young, he sought out people like More, and encouraged them to be honest with him, seeking some solid ground on which to base a relationship. But it was a zero sum game; when More ran up against Henry’s need to be the center of the universe, More’s once-cherished independence of mind became worse than “nothing” in Henry’s “all or nothing” demands on relationships.

It’s hard to know exactly what threw the switch with Anne. Her final miscarriage may have convinced him that God was not on the side of their relationship. He may have believed in the charges of adultery—although his exaggerated estimates of her infidelities make me less rather than more likely to believe that; if he truly believed she had slept with five men, including her own brother, surely that would have been enough to “justify” his outrage without dragging half the men in court into her bed. Or the humiliation of hearing that Anne gossiped about his lack of sexual performance may have been all that was needed. We will never know, and it really doesn’t matter. It was sufficient, whatever it was, to shut off any currents of empathy, memory, attachment that Henry felt for Anne. This is where “Anne of the Thousand Days” has it so wrong. The play and movie both open with Henry tormented by the decision whether or not to order Anne’s execution. In Maxwell Anderson’s play, which is written in verse, Henry muses:

“This is hard to do
when you come to put pen to paper.
You say to yourself:
She must die. And she must—
If thing are to go as planned.
Yes, if they are to go at all.
If I am to rule
And keep my sanity and hold my England off the rocks…
Go back to it, Henry, go back to it.
Keep your mind
On this parchment you must sign.
Dip the pen in the ink write your name…

It’s only that a woman you’ve held in your arms
And longer for when she was away,
And suffered with her—no, but she promised you an heir.
Write it down—
Write Henry Rex, and it’s done.
And then the headsman
Will cry out suddenly, “Look, look there!’
And point to the first flash of sunrise,
And she’ll look,
Not knowing what he means, and his sword will flash
In the flick of sun, through the little bones of her neck
As she looks away,
And it will be done.
It will be done.”

It’s romantic and moving, and beautifully written. But it is not, I believe, the poetry of Henry’s reality. In that reality, they handed him the parchment. He dipped the pen in the ink. He signed his name: Henry Rex. And it was done.

Based on material from The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look of England’s Most Notorious Queen, available in a US edition or a UK edition.

From the time she was taken to the Tower, Anne’s moods, according to Constable Kingston, vacillated wildly, from resignation to hope to anxiety. She had always had a wicked sense of humor, and no irony was ever lost on her. When taken to the Tower, she had asked, “Master Kingston, shall I die without justice?” He replied, “The poorest subject the king hath, had justice.” Hearing this, despite her fear, Anne laughed. She was too sophisticated and savvy about the dispensing of royal power to swallow the official PR. Even the night before her execution, her sense of irony held as she wryly remarked that her enemies would remember her as “la Royne Anne Sans Tete” But until very near the end, she also seized on any glimmer of hope. She was the queen, after all, and no one in England had ever executed a queen. Isabella of Angouleme and Isabella of France, both married to English kings, had been adulterous, but only their lovers were executed. Even those who had been involved in acts of treason—the most famous of all being Eleanor of Aquitaine, who almost succeeded in toppling Henry II from his throne—at most were put under house arrest. It was almost unthinkable to Anne that Henry would have her put to death. But so, too, was her imprisonment, which had come so suddenly, and seemingly without reason. The strangeness of what was happening to her must have been at times impossible for her to assimilate. Just a few short months before, she had been pregnant. Just a few weeks before, Henry had been insisting that the Spanish Emperor acknowledge the legitimacy of their marriage. Now she was in the Tower, condemned to death. Her fortunes had turned around so swiftly and extremely, it must have been difficult to keep a steady grip

On May 5, Anne asked Constable Kingston to “bear a letter from me to Master Secretary.” Kingston then said to her: “Madam, tell it me by word of mouth and I will do it.” Anne thanked him, and after that we hear no more of it in Kingston’s reports, so we don’t know if the letter was written, dictated, or even ever was composed. But one was found among Cromwell’s papers, dated May 6th, apparently undelivered. The handwriting doesn’t correspond exactly (although it is not radically dissimilar) to Anne’s other letters, but it could easily have been transcribed by someone else or written in Anne’s own hand, which could have been altered by the distress of the situation. It begins with a statement that is so startlingly precise in its depiction of Anne’s state of mind at the time, that it’s hard to imagine anyone else, in the decades following her death, writing it:

Your Grace’s displeasure and my imprisonment are things so strange to me, that what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether ignorant. Whereas you send to me (willing me to confess a truth and so obtain your favour), by such a one, whom you know to me mine ancient professed enemy [Cromwell]; I no sooner received this message by him, than I rightly conceived your meaning; and if as you say, confessing a truth indeed my procure my safety, I shall, with willingness and duty, perform your command.

But let not your grace ever imagine your poor wife will ever be brought to acknowledge a fault, where not so much as a thought ever proceeded. And to speak a truth, never a prince had a wife more loyal in all duty, and in all true affection, than you have ever found in Anne Bolen – with which name and place I could willingly have contented myself if God and your grace’s pleasure had so been pleased. Neither did I at any time so far forget myself in my exaltation, or received queenship, but I always looked for such alteration as I now find; for the ground of my preferment being on no surer foundation than your grace’s fancy, the least alteration was fit and sufficient (I knew) to draw that fancy to some other subject.

You have chosen me from a low estate to be your queen and companion, far beyond my just desert or desire; if then you found me worthy of such honour, good your grace, let not any light fancy or bad counsel of my enemies withdraw your princely favour from me, neither let that stain – that unworthy stain – of a disloyal heart toward your good grace ever cast so foul a blot on me and on the infant princess, your daughter [Elizabeth].

Try me, good king, but let me have a lawful trial, and let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and as my judges; yea, let me receive an open trial, for my truth shall fear no open shames; then shall you see either mine innocency cleared, your suspicions and conscience satisfied, the ignominy and slander of the world stopped, or my guilt openly declared. So that whatever God and you may determine of, your grace may be at liberty, both before God and man, not only to execute worthy punishment on me, as an unfaithful wife, but to follow your affection already settled on that party [Anne knew of Henry’s affection for Jane Seymour], for whose sake I am now as I am; whose name I could some good while since, have pointed unto: Your Grace being not ignorant of my suspicions therein.

But if you have already determined of me, and that not only my death, but an infamous slander, must bring you to the joying of your desired happiness, then I desire of God that He will pardon your great sin herein, and, likewise, my enemies, the instruments thereof, and that he will not call you to a strait account for your unprincely and cruel usage of me at his general judgment-seat, where both you and myself must shortly appear; and in whose just judgment, I doubt not (whatsoever the world think of me) mine innocency shall be openly known and sufficiently cleared.

My last and only request shall be, that myself may only bear the burden of your grace’s displeasure, and that it may not touch the innocent souls of those poor gentlemen, whom, as I understand, are likewise in strait imprisonment for my sake.
If ever I have found favour in your site – if ever the name of Anne Bulen have been pleasing in your ears – then let me obtain this request; and so I will leave to trouble your grace no further: with mine earnest prayers to the Trinity to have your grace in his good keeping, and to direct you in all your actions.

From my doleful prison in the Tower, the 6th of May.
Ann Bulen

Most of Anne’s modern biographers believe this letter to be a forgery, in part because it is so daringly accusatory of Henry and in part because the “style” is not like Anne’s. “Its ‘elegance’,” writes Ives, “has always inspired suspicion.” Well, not always. Henry Ellis and other nineteenth-century commentators believed it was authentic. And the “style” argument is an odd one, because we have so few existing letters of Anne’s and they are such business-like affairs, that it’s hard to see how anyone could determine a “style” from them. If Henry had saved her responses to his love letters, we might have a better idea of what Anne was like as a writer, but they were destroyed. As it stands, though, we do have accounts of her behavior and of her speech at her trial on May 15, and they exhibit many of the same qualities as this letter. In both, Anne stands her ground bravely and articulately, but more striking, goes beyond the conventions of the time to venture into deeper political territory, exhibiting unusual insight into her own lack of humility and the possibility that this might have had something to do with her fall from grace.
When it was time for her to speak at her trial, after hearing the full charges for the first time—including trivial, non-criminal but “atmospherically” damaging accusations that she had made fun of the King’s poetry and taste in clothing—she made such “wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her” that “had the peers given in their verdict according to the expectations of the assembly, she had been acquitted.”[1] But of course, the verdict was not dependent on the impression Anne made, or how convincing her defense was. When she protested, against Smeaton’s confession, that “that one witness was not enough to convict a person of high treason”, she was simply informed, “that in her case it was sufficient.” Also “sufficient” were numerous bits of gossip that nowadays would be regarded as worse than hearsay, since they came from obviously prejudiced sources. George Wyatt, writing about the trial later, says that he heard nothing that could be considered evidence. Instead, as author Jane Dunn described the case, it was “a ragbag of gossip, innuendo, and misinterpreted courtliness.”

Anne almost certainly expected the guilty verdict that followed, which makes her calm, clear, and highly intelligent (according to numerous observers) responses to the charges all the more remarkable. It is less likely that she expected the sentence that followed: “that thou shalt be burnt here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off, as the King’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.” On hearing the verdict, several onlookers shrieked, took ill, and had to leave the hall. But Anne, as Chapuys observed, “preserved her composure, saying that she held herself ‘pour toute saluee de la mort’ [always ready to greet death], and that what she regretted most was that the above persons, who were innocent and loyal to the King, were to die for her. And then, as summarized by several onlookers, she delivered an extraordinary speech:

“My lords, I will not say your sentence is unjust, nor presume that my reasons can prevail against your convictions. I am willing to believe that you have sufficient reasons for what you have done; but then they must be other than those which have been produced in court, for I am clear of all the offences which you then laid to my charge. I have ever been a faithful wife to the King, though I do not say I have always shown him that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited. I confess I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him, which I had not discretion enough, and wisdom, to conceal at all times. But God knows, and is my witness, that I have not sinned against him in any other way. Think not I say this in the hope to prolong my life, for He who saveth from death hath taught me how to die, and He will strengthen my faith. Think not, however, that I am so bewildered in my mind as not to lay the honour of my chastity to heart now in mine extremity, when I have maintained it all my life long, much as ever queen did. I know these, my last words, will avail me nothing but for the justification of my chastity and honour. As for my brother and those others who are unjustly condemned, I would willingly suffer many deaths to deliver them, but since I see it so pleases the King, I shall willingly accompany them in death, with this assurance, that I shall lead an endless life with them in peace and joy, where I will pray to God for the King and for you, my lords.”

The clarity and confidence of Anne’s declaration here, her insight into her lack of humility, and her reference to “bewilderment” of mind are all, I believe, support for the authenticity of the May 6 letter. As to the letter’s bold attitude toward Henry, this was characteristic of Anne, and (as she acknowledged in her trial speech) she was aware that it overstepped the borders of what was acceptable. Her refusal to contain herself safely within those borders was what had drawn Henry to her; she could not simply turn the switch off when it began to get her in trouble. To do that would have been to relinquish the only thing left to her at this point: her selfhood. Ives says that it would “appear to be wholly improbable” for a Tudor prisoner to warn the king that he is in imminent danger from the judgment of God.” But Anne was no ordinary prisoner; she had shared Henry’s bed, advised and conspired with him in the divorce strategies, debated theology with him, given birth to his daughter, protested against his infidelities, dared to challenge Cromwell’s use of confiscated monastery money. Arguably, it was her failure to be “appropriate” that contributed to her downfall. Now, condemned to death by her own husband, to stop “being Anne” would have been to shatter the one constancy left in the terrible “strangeness” of her situation.

I don’t know for certain, of course, that this letter is authentic. But I have to wonder whether skeptics have been influenced by Anne’s reputation as woman known for her “feminine” vivacity, emotionality, and sexuality. 19th century editor Henry Ellis called this letter “one of the finest compositions in the English Language.”[27] Ellis lived at a time when women writers had come into their own. But perhaps not every historian has been as ready to acknowledge that someone like Anne could possibly have written “one of the finest compositions in the English language.”
[1] Cited by Alison Weir as Crispin de Milherve, but possibly Lancelot de Carles.

Anne may have unwittingly contributed to those arrests herself. “M. Kyngston,” she asked when brought to the tower, “do you know wher for I am here?” In a state of shock and disbelief, she searched her mind for the reasons for her arrest and shared her anxious musings with Kingston (who reported everything to Cromwell) and also to the ladies-in-waiting that Cromwell had chosen to spy on her. In particular, Anne fretted about a possibly incriminating conversation she had with Norris, a long-time supporter of the Boleyns and the Groom of the Stool in the King’s Privy Council. Anne had been verbally jousting with Norris about his constant presence in her apartments, and had chided him for “looking for dead men’s shoes, for if aught should come to the King but good, you would look to have me.” This particular statement must have alarmed Norris, who replied that “if he should have any such thought, he would his head were off.” There was good reason for his alarm: In 1534, Cromwell had engineered an extension of the legal definition of treason, which was passed by parliament, and which had made it high treason to “maliciously wish, will or desire by words or writing” bodily harm to the king. Under this new definition, Anne’s remark could be construed as referring to Norris’s desire for the King’s death. Anne apparently eventually “got it”, too, for after Norris made the comment about his head, she then told Norris that “she could undo him if she would.” What had (probably) begun as casual teasing ended with each ostentatiously declaring their horror at the thought that either entertained fantasies of Henry’s death.

But Anne worried that this wasn’t enough. Later, realizing that their remarks may have been overheard, she asked Norris to go to her almoner, John Skip, and “swear for the queen that she was a good woman.” Unfortunately, this attempt at damage control only worked to make Skip suspicious. He confided his suspicions to Sir Edward Baynton, who then went to Cromwell, who surely felt that gold from heaven had fallen into his lap. All this happened in late April. So clearly, at the point of Anne’s arrest on May 2, Norris was suspected of more than simply withholding information about her purported affair with Smeaton. However, the full details of the conversation may only have been revealed by Anne herself, in her rambling self-examination with Kingston, and this may be why Norris wasn’t arrested until May 4th.

Anne also told Kingston about how she had teased Francis Weston, then reprimanded him, for telling her that he, too, frequented her apartments out of love for her. Under other circumstances, it would undoubtedly been regarded as innocent, courtly banter. But…what was considered “courtly” and what was suspected to be something more had changed since Anne had learned the rules, and Cromwell was able to take advantage of the different climate with regard to heterosexual behavior.

The times, to anachronistically poach from Bob Dylan, were a ‘changing. Yes, Anne had failed to produce a son for Henry VIII, and yes, Thomas Cromwell had his own reasons to plot against her. Yes, she had many enemies at court, and yes, there was Jane Seymour waiting in the wings, with the promise of greater obedience than feisty Anne and fresher eggs for the incubation of a royal heir. None of these factors, however, could have sent Anne to the scaffold had the charges of adultery and treason seemed utterly preposterous to the Tudor jury, for the Tudors were great believers in “the law,” and it was important to Henry that the “appearance of justice,” at the very least, seem to have been done. What helped make that travesty possible, I believe, was a cultural change in the interpretation of courtly banter, which Anne engaged in—innocently but as it turned out, fatally.

Anne was trained in traditions of courtly love within which flirtatiousness, far from being suspect, was a requirement of the court lady. But it must never go too far; the trick was to just go to the edge and then back off (without, of course, hurting the gentleman’s feelings). Purity was required, but provocative banter was not just accepted, it was expected. Especially in the French court [where Anne had spent much of her young adulthood—sb], a relaxed atmosphere was the norm in conversations between men and women. But as the Middle Ages segued into the Renaissance and then into the Reformation, people may have become disposed to believe things, based on the exchanges with the men Anne was charged with, that would have been dismissed as ridiculous forty years earlier.

Even in Henry’s courtship of her, Anne got caught in the net of changing romantic conventions. Henry had been raised on tales of King Arthur’s round table, virtuous knights, maidens in distress and chivalrous deeds. Nobility, generosity, mercy, justice, and the power of true love were the stuff of his boyish fantasies. However, by 1526, when Henry began to pursue Anne, Arthurian chivalry, a deeply spiritualized ideal, was well on its way to being transformed into the political “art” of courtly behavior, aimed at creating the right impression, even if deceptive, to achieve ones ends. In his letters to Anne, Henry gives her the impression that she is his Guinevere, and he her loyal servant: “I beseech you,” “if it pleases you,” “begging you,” “fear of wearying you,” “your loyal servant”, “to serve you only.” Etc. etc. Deeply felt emotion, or a pleasurable fiction, designed to woo and win?

Henry was in love, yes. But he was never the helpless swain that he makes himself out to be in his letters. And although he believed in Arthurian honor, which served and protected women as one of its highest goals, he could never have done what Arthur (in the legend) had done: stand nobly and patiently by while his best knight and his wife engaged in a long affair. In the legend, Guinevere is condemned to death twice for treason (the second time for adultery with Lancelot) and both times is saved from the stake by Lancelot—with King Arthur’s blessings. Arthur had, in fact, suspected the queen’s infidelity for years, but because of his love for her and for Lancelot, had kept his suspicions a secret. When Modred and Aggravane, plotting their own coup d’etat, told the King about it, he had no choice but to condemn his queen, while privately hoping she would be rescued. It was a romantic fantasy—but one which Henry and Anne had grown up with, and which no doubt shaped their ideas about love. Henry had himself been an adroit and seductively tender courtier, who had pledged himself Anne’s “servant” and swore his constancy. The pledges may (or may not) have been made manipulatively, but his infatuation was real and the gestures were convincing.

Until very near the end, Anne had hopes Henry would spare her. Henry had in fact honored her like Guinevere for six years, and if things went according to the old courtly script, she had every reason to believe Henry would spare her, as Arthur did with Guinevere. But Henry lived in a time when kingly authority—not “knighthood”—was in flower. So while Guinevere, who actually had a sexual relation with another man, was saved by Arthur, Anne Boleyn—guilty of nothing more than a bit of courtly banter—was sent to the scaffold, and Henry never looked back.

Henry VIII remains a titan in the public imagination, and a certain amount of sensationalism comes with his notoriety. And by “a certain amount” I mean “a whole big bunch”. The latest headline to trumpet Henry’s infamy popped up on his birthday, declaring “Henry VIII Would Be A Modern Day Psychopath: When ranked against the ‘psychopathic spectrum’, the king – who beheaded two of his wives – scored 174 against a ‘starting’ psychopath score of 168”.

Huh.

Now, I have been “interviewed” by the press. I have had several friends and colleagues who have also been “interviewed” by the press. The biggest takeaway I’ve gotten from those experiences has been that there is nothing on this sweet green earth that cannot be spun, skewed, or stretched to make a story a little more catchy. This is absolutely painful to academics who would murder their careers if they ever misquoted or paraphrased this loosely with someone else’s words; we are left gaping like a landed trout when it happens because it was unfathomable that anyone would do such a thing. Furthermore, when reporters just flat out make stuff up (or get it wrong if you are feeling generous) we are even more gobsmacked because falsifying information or giving non-factual data is anathema to the academic mindset. It usually doesn’t occur to us that a non-tabloid professional would brazenly do such a thing until it is too late and we are staring bumfuzzled at words/thoughts that we did not say being attributed to us.

Therefore, I am not going to critique Professor Kevin Dutton’s findings or the his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, until I know more about what it actually says. I’ll just content myself by stating that the information as it is presented in the article is mostly crap.

It is crap first and foremost because it takes Henry VIII out of historical context. Professor Dutton is a psychologist and I am fairly sure he knows his stuff since he is an honorary affiliate member of Magdalen College, which is part of Oxford University. Nevertheless, psychology is not history. Nor is it particularly adept at looking at the sociocultural context of its subjects. In fact, psychological theories are based largely on “weird” people, i.e the subject of psychology experiments are usually Western, Educated, from Industrialized and relatively Rich societies which are usually in Democratic countries.

Without a doubt, Professor Dutton would be an expert in finding a psychopath or measure psychopathic qualities/tendencies in modern weird humans. However, Henry VIII was more royal “we” than royal weird. He was Western and Educated, but his country was not particularly industrialized, or comparatively rich, and beyond contestation not a democracy. How does a psychopath test apply to a man who was raised to believe that royalty was appointed by God Himself and the a monarch was divinely ordained on the great chain of being as an inherently better person than all other men? How do you find someone to be egocentric when they have been taught from birth that the King and England are one and the same? How do you judge a person as ruthless that has been carefully schooled in what happens to rulers who fail to be ruthless?

As for scoring Henry VIII “very highly for emotional detachment” … in what decade? Prior to 1535 that man was as emotionally detached as Bella Swan in those odes to dysfunctional co-dependance, the Twilight books. He was devoted to his first wife, Katherina (that is how she signed her name) of Aragon, and was considered amazingly faithful to her by the standards of his time. David Starkey even called Henry almost “uxorious” in his adoration of his regal wife. When he later wanted to divorce her and try for a male heir he ripped holes in the fabric of European religion and politics to marry Anne Boleyn rather than make an “acceptable” marriage with a foreign noblewoman or princess.

Yeah, that’s really emotionally detached right there.

Even after he became mentally compromised (if the Kell/McLeod theory is correct) in the early 1530s he still focused a great deal of attention on the woman he was in love with. His love for Anne didn’t turn into indifference — it became scalding and implacable hate. He practically set up a shrine to Jane Seymour when she died shortly after the birth of their son. He could not keep a politically expedient marriage to Anna of Cleves functioning because he didn’t love her enough. He went bonkers when he found out his fifth wife, Katheryn Howard, had not been a virgin when they wed. He wanted to be married so much that he all but forced Kateryn Parr to accept his proposal.

Jeeze Louise, how emotionally attached do you have to be to not be a psychopath?

Personally, I don’t think Henry VIII is a psychopath when he is viewed in historical context. If the Kell/McLeod theory holds water, his crimes were largely the result of uncontrollable paranoia and mental deterioration. If the theory is not correct, his actions could just as easily be ascribed to a man suffering from a delusional disorder — which opens another can of worms because how do you determine if a King is feeling “grandiose”? If the King had paranoid delusions, how would that effect his psychopathic score?

I am actually interested in reading Professor Dutton’s book, because armchair evals done by experts fascinate me. But unless the book offers much more compelling evidence than the article suggests I will continue to consider Henry VIII to not be a psychopath.

Welcome back! In this special edition of Unsolved Mysteries, we’ll be talking EXCLUSIVELY to Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII to find out what REALLY caused their marriage to fall apart!

HENRY VIII

I was never married to She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

ANNE BOLEYN

Oooh, someone’s read Harry Potter!

HENRY VIII

I was FORCED to find something else to read after finishing my beloved collection of Philippa Gregory novels.

ANNE BOLEYN

Where is that lovely collection? I could really use some kindling for my fireplace!

INTERVIEWER

Do I need to get you two a referee?

HENRY VIII

Course not.

INTERVIEWER

Okay then, Henry, my first question’s for you.

HENRY VIII

Course it is.

ANNE BOLEYN

Can I ask Henry a question first?

INTERVIEWER

Hm. I suppose. As long as it doesn’t involve the words, “Fat,” “Slimy,” or, “Git.”

ANNE BOLEYN

Damn.

HENRY VIII

Why so bitter? You’re the one who made ME a cuckold! Plotted my death! Said my poetry was awful!

ANNE BOLEYN

Can’t deny that I’m guilty of that last charge!

INTERVIEWER

So Anne, would you have ever done anything differently?

ANNE BOLEYN

Not at all. I don’t regret a thing.

HENRY VIII

Really?

ANNE BOLEYN

Well the whole getting beheaded thing hurt a bit, but beggars can’t be choosers.

HENRY VIII

AT LEAST I LET YOU HAVE A SWORD!

INTERVIEWER

Henry, why did you arrange for a special executioner for Anne? Why not just use one of your axe-men?

ANNE BOLEYN

Because he felt guilty.

HENRY VIII

I DID NOT. It was less expensive, and more efficient!

THOMAS CROMWELL

No it wasn’t.

HENRY VIII

SHUT UP CROMWELL!

THOMAS CROMWELL

Shall I pull out the receipts?

HENRY VIII

You still have the receipts?

THOMAS CROMWELL

Just the important ones.

INTERVIEWER

Since you’re here Cromwell, do you mind me asking….

THOMAS CROMWELL

You are the interviewer.

INTERVIEWER

Were you really the main instigator of Anne’s arrest?

THOMAS CROMWELL

I am the King’s good servant.

ANNE BOLEYN

Didn’t another Thomas say that once?

THOMAS CROMWELL

More won’t mind. He wouldn’t want to violate the sanctity of his sainthood with unnecessary anger towards a fellow Thomas.

HENRY VIII

You certainly didn’t handle my affairs with with the other Anne very well!

ANNE BOLEYN

EHarmony would never hire you!

THOMAS CROMWELL

I stand by my matchmaking abilities.

INTERVIEWER

Henry, would you have stayed with Anne had she bore you a son?

HENRY VIII

Of course not. I had no intention of booking a one way ticket to hell.

ANNE BOLEYN

The flames of hell would never have been hot enough to melt the coldness of your heart towards me.

HENRY VIII

Poetic words will get you nowhere Anne.

ANNE BOLEYN

Was that my name I heard coming from your lips?

HENRY VIII

SHE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED! THAT’S WHAT I SAID!

INTERVIEWER

Sureeeee you did. And I’m the Queen of England!

ANNE BOLEYN

Given Henry’s marital record, I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually were!

THOMAS CROMWELL

There’s that Boleyn sass we all know and love!

HENRY VIII

Harrumph. You’ll be getting no love from me.

INTERVIEWER

And I suppose I won’t be getting any answers from ANY OF YOU?

ANNE BOLEYN

Sorry dear. We’re still trying to figure everything out ourselves.

INTERVIEWER

Well, at least answer me this. Anne, did you truly love Henry? And Henry, did you ever truly love Anne?

ANNE BOLEYN

Yes. Yes, I did.

HENRY VIII

I have the right to remain silent!

THOMAS CROMWELL

Aw. Does anybody love me?

INTERVIEWER

Sorry Cromwell, you’re another interview entirely!

(ASIDE) I suppose the mystery of Anne and Henry has yet to be unraveled. At least historical fiction novelists can rest easy, knowing that one of history’s most volatile couple’s can’t even figure out the answer themselves.

By 1536, Henry was well aware that public opinion, especially after the executions of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More (for refusing to take the oath declaring Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England) was not exactly riding in his favor.

Besides anger over Fisher and More, who were generally admired, there was a growing public sentiment over the mistreatment of Katherine and Princess Mary, who Henry kept separated from each other, and treated like discarded limbs. The abuse of Mary was especially acute, as she was forced to wait on her younger sister Elizabeth, and allowed no audience with the King, who had formerly been an affectionate father, so long as she refused to acknowledge Anne as Queen. This she would not do, not even after Anne had personally offered her friendship and a home at court, on that one condition. Despite a huge amount of evidence that Henry was in a rage over his daughter’s “obstinacy” and hardly required any goading to punish and humiliate her, Chapuys blamed her mistreatment entirely on Anne, whom he believed turned the King against Mary, and did all that he could to insure that every other person who would listen to him saw it that way.

Even those who knew better, like Thomas Cromwell, realized that blaming the King for Mary’s mistreatment could create a huge public relations disaster and encouraged Chapuys in his Anne-blaming. As early as October of 1534, Chapuys had met with Cromwell, who reassured Chapuys of Henry’s “paternal affection” for Mary and claimed that “he loved her 100 times more than his last born” and that he and Chapuys should do all that they could to “soften and mend all matter relating to her,” for “in time everything would be set to rights.”[1] Although I am often skeptical of Chapuys’ second and third-hand “intelligence,” the manipulative, self-serving speech he attributes to Cromwell has, to my ears, the ring of truth:

“True it was, “ (Cromwell said) that the King, his master, had occasionally complained of the suit which Your Majesty had instituted against him at Rome, but he [Cromwell] had fully shown that Your Majesty could not help stirring in favour of Queen Katherine, bound as she was to you by the bonds of consanguinity and royal rank; and that, considering the King, his master, if in your Majesty’s place, might have acted as you did there was no fear of his now taking in bad part your interference in the affairs of so close a relative. He himself had so strongly and so often inculcated that reasoning upon the King, that, in his opinion, no cause now remained for disagreement between Your Majesty and his master, save perhaps the affair of these two good ladies [Katherine and Mary]; to remedy which, as he had signified to me, it was needful that we both should agree upon a satisfactory settlement of all complaints, and the knitting of that lasting friendship which might otherwise be endangered. Cromwell ended by saying in passing that it was perfectly true that great union and friendship existed now between France and England, but that I could guess the cause of it. He did not say more on this subject. Your Majesty, by your great wisdom, will be able to judge what Cromwell’s last words meant.”[2]

Of course, the “cause” that was implied here was Anne—who now was “hinted” by Cromwell as standing between the repair of relations between England and Spain, and in a double way: First, because she was known to be a Francophile, but more important, because she was the obstacle standing in the way of reaching a “satisfactory settlement of all complaints” by Katherine and Mary.[3] Chapuys also took Cromwell as hinting “that there was some appearance of the King changing his love.”[4] He wasn’t sure whether to take this seriously—for Cromwell was quite capable of dissembling when it suited his purposes—but what seems crystal clear is that Cromwell was buttering Chapuys up, in the interests of Henry’s PR and future good relations with Charles, and that Anne was already being used by him to take the heat off Henry.

Why would Cromwell, who shared Anne’s religious proclivities, want to stir up the anti-Anne pot with Chapuys and Charles? After all, he had been chief engineer of the break with Rome and, as a reformist himself, had been Anne’s strongest ally at the start of her relationship with Henry. At one point, it was generally believed that Anne, as Chapuys later put it, was “Anne’s right hand.”[5]) What had happened? At this point, nothing of grave significance. But Cromwell was a man who was ever alert to the slightest changes in the weather of power-politics, and Anne had just had a miscarriage in July of 1535. It was not publicly reported, but can be inferred from comments made about her “goodly belly” in April and Henry’s postponement of a trip to France that summer “on account of her condition.”[6] Then, in July: silence. There now had been two unsuccessful pregnancies, as far as the issue of a male heir was concerned. Moreover, although Elizabeth was born healthy and beautiful, this child had not even gone to term—a far more ominous sign for superstitious Henry. Was he already wondering whether God disapproved of this marriage? And did he share his misgivings with his “most beloved” Cromwell?

Cromwell and Anne, moreover, although they inveighed against Rome and fought for the divorce together, had a serious break brewing. For although they may have shared the same “theory” of reform (although we don’t know for sure, as what became English Protestantism was only just evolving) they disagreed sharply on what should be done with the spoils of disbanded churches and monasteries. From the beginning of his ascent to power—and among the reasons why he was able to keep the favor of the nobility, even after Wolsey was deposed—Cromwell “actively assisted the King in diverting revenues from the suppressed monasteries, originally granted to Wolsey’s two colleges, to the purses of Henry’s cronies at court.”[7] Anne, in contrast, favored using the funds to set up educational and charitable institutions, and was shocked to learn that the money was being diverted for private use. This difference between them would not explode until April of 1536, but it seems that in sidling up to Chapuys, Cromwell was already preparing for the possibility that it might come to a show-down resulting in his own fall from favor, and he was seeking alliance with Chapuys to prepare for the need for a strike against Anne.

Cromwell was aware that developing a friendship with Chapuys was risky, but assessing the situation at the time, he wasn’t overly concerned. In June of 1535 he told Chapuys that if Anne knew how close he and Chapuys were, she would see Cromwell’s head off his shoulders. At the time, Cromwell shrugged it off, telling Chapuys that “I trust so much on my master, that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.”[8] But the differences between Anne and Cromwell were escalating—not just over the use of confiscated money but also over international alliances (Anne favored France, while Cromwell was beginning to lean toward some kind of accommodation with Charles) and the mere fact that Cromwell, in 1535, was already assessing his security relative to Anne’s displeasure with him suggests that he was aware that she could, under the right circumstances, be a danger to him—and was making preparations.

Cromwell also undoubtedly became aware, in the fall of that year, that a new family was rising in the king’s favor: The Seymours. Edward Seymour, who had hosted a visit from Henry to Wolf Hall in September, was becoming a special favorite. Henry had always enjoyed the company of vital, masculine, young men (“thrusting, acquisitive and ambitous” is how Wilson describes them[9]) and as his own athleticism and sense of masculine potency declined, hobbled by leg ulcers and increasing obesity, he may have begun to live vicariously through them, “unconsciously sucking new life from their physical and mental vigor.”[10] By 1535, Seymour’s circle—John Dudley, Thomas Wriosthesley, Ralph Sadler—had come to serve this function for Henry. They were also courting Cromwell, who they rightly saw as having the king’s ear and who was seemingly, at this point, the architect of England’s future. They hated the Boleyns. And Edward Seymour had a sister.

The Other Women: Katherine and Jane

On January 7, 1536, Katherine of Aragon died, most likely of cancer of the heart (a real illness, but an apt bodily metaphor as well.) It was an enormous relief to both Anne and Henry. For Anne, it meant that at last she was the only Queen of England. And both of them hoped that Katherine’s death, removing the chief reason for the Emperor’s breach with Henry, would repair relations with Charles and tip the balance in England’s favor vis a vis Francis (who now would have to court Henry, in order to be sure England did not ally him with Charles.) “The next day”, Ives reports, “the king and queen appeared in joyful yellow from top to toe, and Elizabeth was triumphantly paraded to church. After dinner Henry went down to the Great Hall, where the ladies of the court were dancing, with his sixteen month old daughter in his arms, showing her off to one and another.”[11] Whether or not their yellow clothing was to mark their joy, as Ives says, or a sign of respect for the dead has been much debated. But whatever the meaning of the color of their clothing, at this point, neither had a political reason to mourn Katherine’s death—and Henry, over the years of battle with Katherine, seems to have lost any trace of affection for her.

Chapuys was horrified by their reaction, grief-stricken at having lost his longtime friend, whom he had comforted and championed over the years, and quickly began spreading rumors that Katherine had been poisoned by Anne. But good news was to come a bit later that month, when Chapuys reported, third-hand as usual, that one of the King’s “principal courtiers” said that the King had confessed to another lady and her husband “that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges and charms, and that, owing to that, he held it as null. God (he said) had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children. He, therefore, considered that he could take a third wife, which he said he wished much to do.”[12] Even Chapuys, ever alert to promising signs that Anne would be supplanted, finds this report “incredible.” Anne was in her final month of what was to be her last pregnancy; how could the King be sure that God would not bless the marriage with a male heir this time around? Was someone whispering in Henry’s ear, planting suggestions about Anne?

It seems that this is exactly what was happening. By April 1st, Chapuys was writing to the Emperor, informing him that the king was “paying court” to Edward Seymour’s sister Jane, and that he had “heard” (from the Marchioness of Exeter) that Jane had been “well tutored and warned by those among this King’s couriers who hate the concubine, telling her not in any wise to give in to the King’s fancy unless he makes her his Queen, upon which the damsel is quite resolved. She has likewise been advised to tell the King frankly, and without reserve, how much his subjects abominate the marriage contracted with the concubine, and that not one considers it legitimate.”[13] The Marchioness also requested, at this time, that Chapuys himself aid in whatever way he can in the “meritorious work” of removing Anne and thus, not only protecting Princess Mary from Anne’s evil plotting and ridding the country of the “heretical doctrines and practices” of “Lutheranism,” but “clearing the King from the taint of a most abominable and adulterous marriage.”[14]

In the four months between Katherine’s death and Henry’s open courting of Jane, two momentous events had occurred. On January 24, Henry had a bad jousting accident, which left him unconscious for two hours, and undoubtedly stirred up his anxiety about his own diminishing physical competence and reminded him of his mortality—something he had been trying to avoid all his life through a hypochondria bordering on obsession. Then, on January 29th, Anne miscarried. Although it was probably too early in the pregnancy for attendants to determine the sex of the child, which was later described by Nicholas Sander as a “shapeless mass of flesh,” it was reported by both Chapuys and Wriosthesley that it had been a male. This was a “huge psychological blow” to Henry.[15] We only have Chapuys to rely on for details—“I see that God will not give me male children” he reports Henry as saying, and then ominously telling Anne that he would “speak to her” when she was up—but whether the quote is accurate or not, it makes sense that the loss of a potential heir, especially after at least one other miscarriage and his own recent brush with death, would have affected Henry deeply.[16] Anne, on her part, was distraught. She appealed to Henry, telling him that the miscarriage was the result of shock over his accident, which is not improbable, although Chapuys dismissed it. In a letter of February 17, he wrote to Charles that Anne’s inability to bear male children was due to her “defective constitution,” that “the real cause” of this particular miscarriage may have been the King’s “behavior toward a damsel of the Court, named Miss Seymour, to whom he has latterly made very valuable presents.”[17]

Jane was a startling contrast to Anne: “fair, not dark; younger by seven or eight years; gentle rather than abrasive; of no great wit, against a mistress of repartee; a model of female self-effacement against a self-made woman.”[18] Plus, whether through coaching or inspiration of her own, she refused the king’s gifts, saying that her greatest treasure was her honor, and that she would accept sovereigns from him in “such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage.”[19] She may have not been of “great wit” but she (or her brother) knew that this would increase Henry’s ardour. The refusal of sovereigns happened after Anne’s miscarriage, an event which undoubtedly emboldened Jane and her supporters. For if Anne had produced a living son, all the rumblings about Anne, both at court and among the people, all the conniving of the Seymours, would have crashed against a brick wall. But it was Anne’s disastrous luck that not only did she miscarry, but that it happened after Katherine died. Initially, it had been a cause for celebration. What Anne did not take into account (or perhaps did, but had no reason to consider probable at this point) was that with Katherine’s death, Henry could have his marriage to Anne annulled, or invalidated in some other way, without having to deal with Katherine’s claims to the throne. Disastrously and without precedent, it was “the some other way” that prevailed.

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Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning Wolf Hall ends portentously, with Cromwell and Henry about to embark, in September 1535, on a progress that would include a stop at Wolf Hall, home of John Seymour and his family. Mantel chose the ending (and the title of her book), we can safely speculate, to mark the beginning of Anne’s final and fatal twist of bad luck, with Henry catching sight of Jane, John Seymour’s daughter.

Mantel’s is not the first or last depiction to imagine such a meeting—among the most well known, the BBC’s Six Wives of Henry VIII and Showtimes’ Tudors. It’s one of those fictions that have endured across the centuries in our collective narrative of Anne’s fall. But it’s very unlikely either that Henry saw Jane for the first time at Wolf Hall, for Jane had been one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies, and then returned to court to be part of Anne Boleyn’s entourage in 1534, well before the Wolf Hall progress, or that anything momentous passed between them on that visit. For one thing, Anne was with Henry. For another, we don’t even know for sure if Jane was there.

The first clear mention of a relationship between Henry and Jane occurs in Chapuys’ February 17 (1536) letter to Charles, in which he wrote that Anne’s inability to bear male children was due to her “defective constitution,” and that “the real cause” of her miscarriage of January 29 may have been the King’s “behavior toward a damsel of the Court, named Miss Seymour, to whom he has latterly made very valuable presents.”

February 1536. If the king had begun seriously pursuing Jane in September of 1535, it’s highly unlikely that the gossip-hungry Chapuys—always ready to report any decline in Henry’s feelings for Anne—would have waited six months to report it to Charles. It makes for a good story: King’s declining passion for his first wife, her escalating jealousy and shrewishness, setting the stage for a tipping-point meeting between Henry and sweet, submissive Jane, providing the spark which turned the tinder of his marriage to Anne into a roaring, destructive fire. But in fact, there seems to have been no single factor—certainly not Jane Seymour–that brought about the disastrous events of April-May 1536, but a combustion of court atmospherics, political maneuvering, and sheer bad luck. What turned the cherished, hotly pursued consort into the lady in the tower, awaiting her execution, did not belong primarily to the realm of emotions, but to the gathering of a “perfect storm” of political, personal, and biological events, the absence of any one of which might have resulted in things turning out very differently for Anne.

The atmospherics included a strong political/religious “wing” of anti-Anne sentiment that was a powerful obstacle in the way of Anne’s acceptance by the (still largely Catholic) English people. In gaining that acceptance—and with it some protection from the winds of shifting politics—Anne already had several strikes against her. She had supplanted a beloved queen. She was rumored to be “haughty” and suspiciously “French”–and even worse than that, a vocal, intellectual, “interfering” woman. Even those who shared her religious views, like Cromwell, had no scruples about spreading nasty rumors when it suited their purposes. For Anne’s reputation as a woman who simply would not behave as she should had created an atmosphere that did not incline men to be her protectors, but rather freed them to take the gloves off when fighting with her. “Had she been gracious and modest,” writes 19th century commentator James Froude, “she might have partially overcome the prejudice against her.” (P 384). “Gracious and modest” seem like laudable qualities. But what they meant in the context of the times and why Anne could never play the part is laid bare by David Loades: “Anne could not pretend to be a fool or a nonentity, and the self-effacement customary in a royal consort did not suit her style at all…In many ways her sharpness of perception and readiness of wit made her more suitable for the council chamber than for the boudoir.” (69) But women did not belong in the council chamber.

By 1536, Henry was also well aware that public opinion, especially after the executions of Bishop Fisher and Thomas More (for refusing to take the oath declaring Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England) was not exactly riding in his favor.

Besides anger over Fisher and More, who were generally admired, there was a growing public sentiment over the mistreatment of Katherine and Princess Mary, who Henry kept separated from each other, and treated like discarded limbs. The abuse of Mary was especially acute, as she was forced to wait on her younger sister Elizabeth, and allowed no audience with the King, who had formerly been an affectionate father, so long as she refused to acknowledge Anne as Queen. This she would not do, not even after Anne had personally offered her friendship and a home at court, on that one condition. Despite a huge amount of evidence that Henry was in a rage over his daughter’s “obstinacy” and hardly required any goading to punish and humiliate her, Chapuys blamed her mistreatment entirely on Anne, whom he believed turned the King against Mary, and did all that he could to insure that every other person who would listen to him saw it that way.

Even those who knew better, like Thomas Cromwell, realized that blaming the King for Mary’s mistreatment could create a huge public relations disaster and encouraged Chapuys in his Anne-blaming. As early as October of 1534, Chapuys had met with Cromwell, who reassured Chapuys of Henry’s “paternal affection” for Mary and claimed that he “loved her 100 times more than his last born” and that he and Chapuys ought to do all that they could to “soften and mend all matter relating to her,” for “in time everything would be set to rights.” Although I am often skeptical of Chapuys’ second and third-hand “intelligence,” the manipulative, self-serving speech he attributes to Cromwell has, to my ears, the ring of truth. In it, Cromwell takes credit for paving the way to smoother relations between Henry and Charles, and assures Chapuys that the only obstacle standing between a renewed friendship between England and Spain was a “satisfactory settlement of all complaints” held by Mary and Katherine. He ended, Chapuys reports, ”by saying in passing that it was perfectly true that great union and friendship existed now between France and England, but that I could guess the cause of it. He did not say more on this subject. Your Majesty, by your great wisdom, will be able to judge what Cromwell’s last words meant.”

Of course, the “cause” that was implied here was Anne—who now was “hinted” by Cromwell as standing between the repair of relations between England and Spain, and in a double way: First, because she was known to be a Francophile, who had been raised to be “more French than English,” but more important, because she was the obstacle standing in the way of reaching a “satisfactory settlement of all complaints” by Katherine and Mary. Chapuys also took Cromwell as hinting “that there was some appearance of the King changing his love.” He wasn’t sure whether to take this seriously—for Cromwell was quite capable of dissembling when it suited his purposes—but what seems crystal clear is that Cromwell was buttering Chapuys up, in the interests of Henry’s PR and future good relations with Charles, and that Anne was already being used by him to take the heat off Henry.

Why would Cromwell, who shared Anne’s religious proclivities, want to stir up the anti-Anne pot with Chapuys and Charles? After all, he had been chief engineer of the break with Rome and, as a reformist himself, had been Anne’s strongest ally at the start of her relationship with Henry. At one point, it was generally believed that Anne had him “in her pocket” (or, as Chapuys later put it, was “Anne’s right hand.”) What had happened? At this point, nothing of grave significance. But the two had a serious break brewing. For although they may have shared the same “theory” of reform (although we don’t know for sure, as what became British Protestantism was only just evolving) they disagreed sharply on what should be done with the spoils of disbanded churches and monasteries. From the beginning of his ascent to power—and among the reasons why he was able to keep the favor of the nobility, even after Wolsey was deposed—Cromwell “actively assisted the King in diverting revenues from the suppressed monasteries, originally granted to Wolsey’s two colleges, to the purses of Henry’s cronies at court.” (43, Hutchinson) Anne, in contrast, favored using the funds to set up educational and charitable institutions, and was shocked to learn that the money was being diverted for private use. This difference between them would not explode until April of 1536, but it seems that in sidling up to Chapuys, Cromwell was already preparing for the possibility that it might come to a show-down resulting in his own fall from favor, and he was seeking alliance with Chapuys to prepare for the need for a strike against Anne.

Cromwell was aware that developing a friendship with Chapuys was risky, but assessing the situation at the time, he wasn’t overly concerned. In June of 1535 he told Chapuys that if Anne knew how close he and Chapuys were, she would see Cromwell’s head off his shoulders. At the time, Cromwell shrugged it off, telling Chapuys that “I trust so much on my master that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.” (Lion’s Court, 384) But the differences between Anne and Cromwell were escalating—not just over the use of confiscated money but also over international alliances (Anne favored France, while Cromwell was beginning to lean toward some kind of accommodation with Charles) and the mere fact that Cromwell, in 1535, was already assessing his security relative to Anne’s displeasure with him suggests that he was aware that she could, under the right circumstances, be a danger to him—and was making preparations.

Cromwell also undoubtedly became aware, in the fall of that year, that a new family was rising in the king’s favor: The Seymours. Edward Seymour, who had hosted a visit from Henry to Wolf Hall in September, was becoming a special favorite. Henry had always enjoyed the company of vital, masculine, young men (“thrusting, acquisitive and ambitious” is how Wilson describes them-p. 386, In The Lion’s Court), and as his own athleticism and sense of masculine potency declined, hobbled by leg ulcers and increasing obesity, he may have begun to live vicariously through them, “unconsciously sucking new life from their physical and mental vigor.” (Wilson, p. 385) By 1535, Seymour’s circle—John Dudley, Thomas Wriosthesley, and Ralph Sadler—had come to serve this function for Henry. They were also courting Cromwell, who they rightly saw as having the king’s ear and who was seemingly, at this point, the architect of England’s future. They hated the Boleyns. And Edward Seymour had a sister. Conveniently, she was in startling contrast to Anne: “fair, not dark; younger by seven or eight years; gentle rather than abrasive; of no great wit, against a mistress of repartee; a model of female self-effacement against a self-made woman.” (Ives, 302)

The gentle, self-effacing sister, however, probably would not have amounted to anything of significance were it not for the momentous events of January 1536. On January 7, Katherine of Aragon had died, most likely of cancer of the heart (a real illness, but an apt bodily metaphor as well.) At the time, it was an enormous relief to both Anne and Henry. For Anne, it meant that at last she was the only Queen of England. And both of them hoped that Katherine’s death, removing the chief reason for the Emperor’s breach with Henry, would repair relations with Charles and tip the balance in England’s favor vis a vis Francis (who now would have to court Henry, in order to be sure England did not ally him with Charles.) “The next day”, Ives reports, “the king and queen appeared in joyful yellow from top to toe, and Elizabeth was triumphantly paraded to church. After dinner Henry went down to the Great Hall, where the ladies of the court were dancing, with his sixteen month old daughter in his arms, showing her off to one and another.” Whether or not their yellow clothing was to mark their joy, as Ives says, or a sign of respect for the dead has been much debated. But whatever the meaning of the color of their clothing, at this point, neither had a political reason to mourn Katherine’s death—and Henry, over the years of battle with Katherine, seems to have lost any trace of affection for her.

Chapuys, however, was horrified by their reaction, grief-stricken at having lost his longtime friend, whom he had comforted and championed over the years, and quickly began spreading rumors that Katherine had been poisoned by Anne. But good news was to come a bit later that month, when Chapuys reported, third-hand as usual, that one of the King’s “principal courtiers” said that the King had confessed to another lady and her husband that “he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges and charms, and that, owing to that, he held it as null. God (he said) had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children. He, therefore, considered that he could take a third wife, which he said he wished to do.” Even Chapuys, ever alert to promising signs that Anne would be supplanted, finds this report “incredible.” Anne was in her final month of pregnancy; how could the King be sure that God would not bless the marriage with a male heir this time around? Was someone whispering in Henry’s ear, planting suggestions about Anne?

It seems that this is exactly what was happening. By April 1st, Chapuys was writing to the Emperor, informing him that the king was “paying court” to Edward’s sister Jane, and that he had “heard” (from the Marchioness of Exeter) that Jane had been “well tutored and warned by those among this King’s couriers who hate the concubine, telling her not in any wise to give in to the King’s fancy unless he makes her his Queen, upon which the damsel is quite resolved. She has likewise been advised to tell the King frankly, and without reserve, how much his subjects abominate the marriage contracted with the concubine, and that not one considers it legitimate.” The Marchioness also requested, at this time, that Chapuys himself aid in whatever way he can in the “meritorious work” of removing Anne and thus, not only protecting Princess Mary from Anne’s evil plotting and ridding the country of the “heretical doctrines and practices” of “Lutheranism,” but “clearing the King from the taint of a most abominable and adulterous marriage.”

In the short space between Katherine’s death and Henry’s open courting of Jane, two events that proved disastrous to Anne had occurred. These events were far more decisive to her future than any developing attraction of Henry for Jane. First, on January 24, Henry had a bad jousting accident, which left him unconscious for two hours, and undoubtedly stirred up his anxiety about his own diminishing physical competence and reminded him of his mortality—something he had been trying to avoid all his life through a hypochondria bordering on obsession. Then, on January 29th, Anne miscarried. Although it was probably too early in the pregnancy for attendants to determine the sex of the child, which was described by Chapuys as a “shapeless mass of flesh,” it was reported by both Chapuys and Wriosthesley that it had been a male. This was a “huge psychological blow” to Henry. We only have Chapuys to rely on for details—“I see that God will not give me male children” he reports Henry as saying, and then ominously telling Anne that he would “speak to her” once she was up—but whether the quote is accurate or not, it makes sense that the loss of a potential heir, especially after at least one other miscarriage and his own recent brush with death, would have affected Henry deeply. Anne, on her part, was distraught. She appealed to Henry, telling him that the miscarriage was the result of shock over his accident, which is not improbable, although Chapuys, as mentioned earlier, believed it to be cause by her “defective constitution” and jealousy over Jane, to whom the king had been sending gifts, just as he had done in the early days of his courtship of Anne.

Whether through coaching or inspiration of her own, Jane refused the king’s gifts, saying that her greatest treasure was her honor, and that she would accept sovereigns from him “once God had sent her a good match.” She may have not been of “great wit” but she (or her brother) knew that this would increase Henry’s ardor. The refusal of sovereigns happened, however, only after Anne’s miscarriage, suggesting this was an event that emboldened Jane and her supporters. For if Anne had produced a living son, all the rumblings about Anne, both at court and among the people, all the conniving of the Seymours, would have crashed against a brick wall. But it was Anne’s disastrous luck that not only did she miscarry, but that it happened after Katherine died. Initially, that death had been a cause for celebration. What Anne did not take into account (or perhaps did, but had no reason to consider probable at this point) was that with Katherine’s death, Henry could have his marriage to Anne annulled, or invalidated in some other way, without having to deal with Katherine’s claims to the throne. Fatally and without precedent, it was “the some other way” that prevailed.

There are a number of theories as to what allowed the unthinkable—the state-ordered execution of a Queen—to happen. One theory, first advanced by Retha Warnicke and adopted by a number of novels and media depictions, is that the miscarried fetus was grossly deformed, which led to suspicions of witchcraft. If Henry truly believed that Anne was guilty of witch-craft—which of course was a possibility in those times—he would have virtually no choice but to destroy her, as with anyone in league with Satan. But although Henry complained, at one point, that he had been bewitched by Anne, that was a notion that, as in our own time, was freely bandied about in very loose, metaphorical manner. It could mean simply “overcome beyond rationality by her charms” (as Chapuys himself means it early in Anne and Henry’s relationship, when he complained that the “accursed lady has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare to do anything against her will.”) Moreover, none of the charges later leveled against Anne involved witchcraft, and there is no evidence that the fetus was deformed.

Another theory, which Alison Weir puts forward in The Six Wives of Henry VIII but revises in The Lady in the Tower, is that Henry, fed up with Anne, newly enamored of Jane, and eager “to rid himself” of his second wife but not knowing how, eagerly embraced Cromwell’s suggestion, in April, that he had information that Anne had engaged in adultery. “Spurred by his passion for Jane, his need of the Spanish alliance, and his desire for vengeance against Anne, who had promised so much and failed to deliver,” he “accepted the allegations at face value, merely asking Cromwell to find evidence to support them.” (309) But even if we accept the idea that Henry would cynically encourage a plot designed to lead to Anne’s execution, and despite his flirtation with Jane and disappointment over the miscarriage, Henry did not behave, before Cromwell put the allegations before him, like someone looking to end his marriage. Whatever he was feeling about Anne, recognition of his supremacy was still entwined with her, and even after the miscarriage, he was still working for imperial recognition of his marriage to “his beloved wife” Anne. With Katherine gone, it seemed a real possibility. And in fact, in March, the emperor offered, in return for the legitimation of Mary, imperial support for “the continuance of this last matrimony or otherwise,” as Henry wished (Ives 312). The deal didn’t work out, due to Henry’s refusal to acknowledge that anything about his first marriage—including Mary—was legitimate. He was utterly committed to maintaining his own absolute right to the organization of his domestic affairs, and that meant both recognition of Anne as lawful wife and Mary as bastard.

Most scholars nowadays (with a couple of exceptions whom I’ll discuss elsewhere) believe, following Eric Ives, that Thomas Cromwell orchestrated the plot against Anne, without Henry’s instigation or encouragement. Things had been brewing dangerously between him and Anne for some time, and by April, she probably knew that he had become friends with the Seymours and had also been sidling up to Chapuys. On April 2, Anne had dared to make a public declaration of her opposition to his policies by approving of a sermon written by her almoner, John Skip, in which he compared Cromwell to Haman, the evil, Old Testament councilor. The specific spur for the sermon was proposed legislation to confiscate the wealth of smaller monasteries, which was awaiting Henry’s consent and against which Anne was trying to generate public sentiment. But by then, the enmity between Anne and Cromwell had become more global than one piece of legislation. Still, as he told Chapuys, Cromwell felt more or less secure in Henry’s favor until a crucial meeting between the Ambassador and the King on April 18th, in which Henry, who had seemed to be in favor of the reconciliation with Rome which Cromwell had been negotiating with Chapuys, now revealed his true hand, and refused any negotiation that included recognition of his first marriage and Mary’s inclusion in the line of succession. Cromwell was aghast at Henry’s stubbornness, as he had been working hard toward the rapprochement with the emperor, burned his bridges with France, and (because of his relationship with Chapuys) with Anne and her faction as well. Earlier in the day, it had seemed that some kind of warming between Chapuys and Anne was being orchestrated. Chapuys had been invited to visit Anne and kiss her hand—which he declined to do—then, was obliged to bow to her when she was thrust in his path during church services. Later, at dinner, Anne loudly made remarks critical of France, which were carried back to Chapuys. But when after dinner, Henry took Chapuys to a window enclosure in his own room for a private discussion, he made it clear that he wouldn’t give.

“Far from the issue of April 1536 being ‘When will Anne go and how?’” Ives writes, “Henry was exploiting his second marriage to force Europe to accept that he had been right all along.” (315) Cromwell was furious, humiliated, and fearful that he had unexpectedly found himself on the wrong side of Henry’s plans. In a letter to Charles, Chapuys wrote about the April 18 meeting, and what he wrote suggests that what was already on high heat between Cromwell and Anne was about to boil over. Chapuys reports that one reason why he would not “kiss or speak to the Concubine” and “refused to visit her until I had spoken to the King,” was because he had been told by Cromwell that the “she devil” (Chapuys’ appellation, not Cromwell’s) “was not in favor with the King” and that “I should do well to wait till I had spoken to the King.” Chapuys, London, 24 April 1536 (Venice Archives).

With the king still pushing for her recognition, Anne must have felt deceptively safe. On April 24, Henry writes a letter to Richard Pate, his ambassador in Rome, and to Gardiner and Wallop, his envoys in France, referring to “the likelihood and appearance that God will send us heirs male [by] our most dear and most entirely beloved wife, the Queen.” But something has already begun to seem wrong to Anne, who seeks out her chaplain, Matthew Parker on the 26th, and asks him to take care of Elizabeth, should anything happen to her. And in the days that follow, Chapuys is clearly (and gleefully) aware that plots are being hatched against Anne. He writes to Charles that there is much covert discussion, at court, as to whether or not “the King could or could not abandon the said concubine,” and that Nicholas Carew is “daily conspiring” against Anne, “trying to convince Miss Seymour and her friends to accomplish her ruin. Indeed, only four days ago the said Carew and certain gentlemen of the King’s chamber sent word to the Princess to take courage, for very shortly her rival would be dismissed.” When the bishop of London, John Stokesley, expressed skepticism, “knowing well the King’s fickleness” and fearful that should Anne be restored to favor, he would be in danger, Chapuys reassures him that the King “would certainly desert his concubine.”

In fact, after the April 18th meeting, Cromwell, claiming illness, had gone underground to begin an intense “investigation” into Anne’s conduct. On April 23, he emerged, and had an audience with Henry. We have no record of what was said. But many scholars believe that the illness was a ruse, that during his retreat he carefully plotted Anne’s downfall, and that what he told the king on April 23 were the deadly rumors about Anne that eventually led to her arrest and trial. The king, however—perhaps dissembling for public consumption, or perhaps unconvinced by what Cromwell has told him—was still planning to take Anne with him to Calais on May 4th, after the May Day jousts, and was still pressing Charles to acknowledge the validity of his marriage to Anne. Then, on April 30th, Cromwell and his colleagues lay all the charges before Henry, and court musician Mark Smeaton is arrested.

Anne had no idea that Cromwell and Henry, that day, were meeting to discuss the “evidence” that Anne had engaged in multiple adulteries and acts of treason. That evening, while Smeaton was being interrogated (and probably tortured), there was even a ball at court at which “the King treated Anne as normal.” He may have been awaiting Smeaton’s confession, which didn’t come for 24 hours, to feel fully justified in abandoning the show of dutiful husband. Although we don’t know for sure what message was given to Henry during the May Day tournaments, it was probably word of Smeaton’s confession, for he immediately got up and left. Anne, who had been sitting at his side, would never see him again; the very next day, as her dinner was being served to her, she was arrested and conducted to the Tower.

Eustace Chapuys as portrayed by Irish actor Anthony Brophy on The Tudors

Most non-historians, before Showtimes’ The Tudors introduced him to popular audiences, had never heard of Eustace Chapuys. Those who had certainly did not think of him as a prominent figure in Tudor history—not like Wolsey or Cromwell, for example. Yet, amazingly, especially in light of his undisguised hatred of Anne, Chapuys is the man who has most shaped our image of her. He has done so not directly, but via the historians and novelists who have accepted his reports as “biased” but accurate, and hardened them, over time, into “history.”

Eustace Chapuys was just 30 years old when, in 1529, he was sent to replace Don Inigo de Mendoza as ambassador of Emperor Charles V at the court of Henry VIII. Mendoza was known to be “hot-tempered” and “indiscreet” (Mattingly, 178), and Chapuys, a legal scholar and humanist enthusiast, was thought to be a better choice for Henry’s court. As ambassador, Chapuys was both representative of the Emperor to Henry, and the main source of information about Henry to the Emperor and other Spanish officials. His lengthy, anecdote-filled letters home offer the single most continuous portrait of the sixteen crisis-ridden years in which he served in his position, and biographers have relied on him heavily in their attempts to create a coherent narrative about the divorce from Catherine, the role of Anne Boleyn, and her relationship with Henry. It’s easy to see why. Chapuys clearly loved to write, he did so often, and he had a taste for juicy detail. But he also had a horse in the race, for the Emperor was Catherine’s nephew, and Chapuys was, despite his humanist training, fiercely pro-Catholic. He also hated all things French, and later in his life would threaten to disinherit a niece who planned to marry a Frenchman. (Mattingly, 184). It’s difficult to imagine someone who would be less disposed to the dissolution of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and more opposed to the marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn, who was both sympathetic to reformist ideas and “more French than a Frenchwoman born.”

But Chapuys wasn’t just “opposed.” He despised Anne with a passion that he didn’t even try to disguise, disgustedly referring to her in his official communications as “the concubine” and “that whore”—or, with polite disdain, “The Lady.” Accordingly, Elizabeth was “the little bastard.” He accused Anne of plotting to murder Catherine and Mary—without a shred of proof beyond a few reported outbursts of Anne’s—and was the first to advance the argument that she was responsible for Henry’s “corruption.” (“It is this Anne,” Chapuys wrote, “who has put Henry in this perverse and wicked temper.” P. 484, Starkey) Chapuys also took every opportunity to contrast “the people’s” hatred of Anne with their great love of Catherine. When Henry had Katherine removed from court,

“All the neighborhood assembled to see her and pay her honor; and it is incredible what affection has been shown to her along the whole route. Notwithstanding that it has been forbidden on pain of death to call her Queen, they shouted it out at the top of their voices, wishing her joy, repose, and prosperity, and confusion to her enemies. They begged her with hot tears to set them to work and employ them in her service, as they were ready to die for the love of her.” (July 30, 1533)

The contrast is almost Hollywood-ready: the sullen, disrespectful observers of Anne’s procession; the cheering throngs, ready to die for their true Queen as she was led away from her rightful throne.

How accurate were Chapuys’ reports? It’s almost impossible to say in the (many) cases in which he is the sole reporter of events.

Katherine of Aragon

But what is clear is that his interests were served by painting the worst picture possible of Anne, and that he worked hard to construct it. He had an informal network of “conservative” (i.e. pro-Roman, pro-Katherine, pro-Imperial) nobles who would meet with him secretly to convey the latest anti-Anne gossip, which he then relayed to the Emperor as “word from a trustworthy source.” And although there is no evidence that he played a direct role in the plot to charge Anne with treason, he “carefully watched all courtly signs of rejection leading up to her fall and exerted small pushes of encouragement, particularly with Cromwell.” (Lundell, p. 77), and declared it “wonderful” when she was arrested. (to Charles, May 2, 1536) Chapuys was even willing to foment war between England and Spain if that was the only way to get Anne out of the picture and (as he saw it), keep Catharine and Mary out of harm’s way and restore relations between Henry and Rome:

“Englishmen, high and low,” he wrote to Charles, “desire your majesty to send an army to destroy the venomous influence of the Lady and her adherents, and reform the realm…When this accursed Anne has her foot in the stirrup, she will do the Queen and the Princess all the harm she can. She boasts that she will have the Princess in her own train; one day, perhaps, she will poison her, or will marry her to some varlet, while the realm itself will be made over to heresy. “ (April 10, 1533)

Chapuys “bias” against Anne (if that mild word can do it justice) is obvious in every communication, from the very start of his service. Even more strikingly, until Chapuys’s arrival, the Collected Letters and Papers of Henry VIII contain no seriously negative personal reports about Anne (beyond a few swipes at her appearance by Sanuto.) As soon as Chapuys arrived, however, “Madam Anne” became “the concubine,” and everything that the pro-Catherine forces saw as dishonorable in Henry’s behavior became the fault of Anne’s “perverse and malicious nature.” (30th July, 1533.) “It is she who now rules over, and governs the nation; the King dares not contradict her,” he wrote to Charles in November of 1535—an extraordinary (and unbelievable) statement which paints the formidable Henry as nothing more than a pussy-whipped hubby.

It is Chapuys, too, who is largely responsible for our ideas about the decline of Anne and Henry’s relationship. In a letter of Sept 3, 1533—just a few days before Elizabeth was born, he reports how Anne, “full of jealousy, and not without cause, used some words to the King at which he was displeased, and told her she must shut her eyes, and endure as well as more worthy persons, and that she ought to know that it was in his power to humble her again in a moment more than he had exalted her.” This speech has made its way into virtually every later biography, historical fiction, and film, probably due to its foreboding nature in light of later events, and because it signals such a startling turnaround in Henry’s treatment of Anne. But irresistibly drama-friendly as it is, there’s little corroboration for it. Chapuys never explains the “not without cause” nor how he happened to be present at this argument (if indeed he was; many of his reports are attributed to un-named sources.) His real purpose in “reporting” the incident (which even he admitted was a “lover’s quarrel”) is revealed at the end of the letter, when he adds that “many who know the King’s disposition consider [such quarrels] a very favorable commencement for the recall of the Queen [Katherine]” Chapuys was always working this angle with Charles and, when he could, orchestrating anti-Anne sentiment and activity around Henry’s court.

It’s true that it was not uncommon for Henry to graze when his Queens were pregnant. No-one knows for sure how many of these flirtations were innocent, “courtly” play, and how many were actual physical involvements. We do know that he had sexual mistresses when he was married to Katherine, and now that any motive to remain chaste for Anne was gone—he’d won the prize, and it was no longer necessary to play the devoted swain, or to avoid possible pregnancies with other women—why should it be any different? But whether Henry’s affairs were physical or not, what seems hugely unlikely is that he would chastise Anne so harshly when she was so far along in her pregnancy, especially this long-awaited pregnancy, which all the stars and seers had predicted would result in a boy. Even during her final pregnancy, when hopes were not nearly so high, he seems to have been careful with Anne. When she purportedly caught the King with Jane Seymour on his knee and “flew into a frenzy,” the King, “seeing his wife hysterical and fearing for their child, sent Jane out of the room and hastened to placate Anne. ‘Peace be, sweetheart, and all shall go well with thee,’ he soothed.” Although the reporters of this incident, too, are not very trustworthy (Weir says they came by way of a chain of reports, one passed on to the next, by various ladies at the court), this behavior sounds more like Henry’s modus operandi (utter some soothing words, then do what you want) than a king who would risk upsetting a very pregnant wife.

Will the real Eustace Chapuys please stand up?

It is Chapuys, too, who claimed, in a letter to Charles, that the birth of a daughter was “to the great regret both of him and the lady,” and filled Anne and Henry with nothing but “great disappointment and sorrow.” He goes on to write that “it must be concluded that God has entirely abandoned the king, and left him prey to his own misfortune, and to his obstinate blindness, that he may be punished and completely ruined.” This reported reaction, although challenged by historians, has been firmly installed—and embellished—in the popular mythology about Elizabeth’s birth, particularly in the novels. Paul Rival: “A girl! …She heard the whispers of her attendants and Henry’s protests and thought to herself: ‘If only I could die!’”Nora Lofts: “It was a girl…She knew she had failed, and willed herself away, welcoming the enveloping darkness.”(279) Philippa Gregory has an angry Anne pushing the baby away: “A daughter? What use is a daughter to me?” Anne of the Thousand Days depicts Henry as furious, at Elizabeth’s birth; The Tudors portrays him as cold and grim. But historians, too, have played their part, often taking it as highly significant that prepared documents, announcing the birth of a prince, were hastily altered with an added “s.” Antonia Fraser says this “attests to the surprise and displeasure” caused by the birth.

Surprise, yes. And undoubtedly, disappointment. But was the birth of Elizabeth really the “heavy blow” that David Starkey claims? Eric Ives, the most careful of scholars, writes that there is “no evidence of the crushing psychological blow that some have supposed.” (184) Anne had had a hard pregnancy, and “Henry’s predominant emotion was relief.” In those days, merely to give birth to a healthy, living child was, after all, quite an accomplishment. What “The Tudors” has Henry saying is true to the material realities of the time: “This time a girl. But we are young and healthy and by the grace of God boys will follow.” But JRM say it with such a pinched look on his face, we take it as forced. The fact is that Anne having given birth to a healthy infant the first time around portended very well for the future, especially after Katherine’s many miscarriages.

Here again, we have to consider the original source. In the same letter in which Chapuys tells Charles of Elizabeth’s birth, he reports that “the people” were “glad” that the King and Anne had a daughter rather than a son (which seems highly unlikely) and that “the new child is to be “called Mary, like the Princess; which title, I hear in many quarters, will be taken from the true princess and given to her.” This (completely false) rumor pleases Chapuys enormously, for “defrauding the said Princess of her title” will “augment” the “indignation of the people, both small and great, which grows every day.” This, of course, was an “indignation” that Chapuys tried to inflame every chance he got, for he was well aware (as he tells Charles in the same letter) that “it may cool in time, so that it should be used in season.” It was also in his interests to convince Charles (who was Katherine’s nephew as well as the head of the Holy Roman Empire) that, despite appearances, getting rid of Anne was still a real possibility. After Katherine died, his efforts to keep Katherine’s cause alive shifted to the restoration of Princess Mary’s claim to the throne, and his case against Anne became focused on her “plots” to murder Mary. He was also an active and eager reporter—and possibly a participant—of later match-making between the King and Jane Seymour, who Chapuys knew would support Mary’s claim. He is about as far from a reliable source on the activities of the ruling administration as Rush Limbaugh was when the Clintons were in power.

We must do more analytical “work” with the original documents than simply reporting what is recorded.

It’s particularly important, when dealing with a sequence of events that is not very well chronicled in the original documents but highly interpreted and dramatized both by historians and in pop culture, that we do more analytical “work” with the original documents than simply reporting what is recorded. The many reports that Henry and Anne were in trouble from the beginning of the marriage, for example, invariably turned out to be rumors which, by virtue of their vacillating nature, show how untrustworthy the reports of those who were eager to see Anne out of the picture were. In December 1533, Chapuys reported that despite the disappointment of Elizabeth’s birth, the King is “enthralled” with Anne; that “she has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare say or do anything against her will and commands.” (Chapuys, of course, isn’t happy about this, which is the most compelling reason for believing him here. He was usually quick to report any loss of the king’s favor for Anne.) In September of 1534, Count Cifuentes wrote Charles that another ambassador had “heard in France that Ana Boulans had in some way or other incurred the Royal displeasure, and was rather in disgrace with the King, who was paying court to another lady.” By October 3, Cifuentes had corrected himself, writing that the idea that Anne and the King were on bad terms was “a hoax.” However, his colleague, Alferez must not have been aware of this recantation, because on Oct 18, he reported that “…the King no longer loved her as before. The King, moreover, was paying court to another lady, and several lords in the kingdom were helping him that they might separate him from Anne’s company.”

But whether or not Henry was involved, relatively early on, with someone else (“Who was this new flame?” Ives asks, skeptically), the quarrels don’t appear to amount to anything until Jane Seymour enters the picture. Anne had her outbursts, Henry had his, but they had many more “merry” times, reported throughout the collected papers, and both had to have been well aware that no royal relationship could ride on the twists and turns of passion. If that had been the case, Henry would have sought to divorce Katherine long before he did, instead of waiting until he had become convinced that she was no longer capable of providing an heir. And kings—not even narcissistic Henry—didn’t get rid of Queens just because they had the occasional jealous outburst. Katherine, too, despite her reputation as the all-accepting, patient Griselda, had had her own vocal quarrels with the King, when he first began to seek the sexual company of other women. It was to be expected, for everyone knew that women were weak and ruled by their passions. But ultimately, once the shouting and weeping were over, the Queen was required to accept and obey.

This was hard for Anne. Whatever the nature of her romantic or sexual feelings for Henry, Anne was used to being the pursued darling for six years, and now was expected to behave like a wife. That included accepting his occasional flirtations, innocent and not, something she apparently found difficult to do. She admitted this herself, in her speech at her trial in 1536: “I confess,” she said, “ I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him, which I had not discretion enough, and wisdom, to conceal at all times.” Whether her jealousy was because she was in love with Henry, or was fearful of being supplanted as Queen, or simply her pride rebelling, we don’t know. But it led to a number of public quarrels, followed by amorous reconciliations (“sunshine and storms” is how Ives describes the years between 1533-36,) both of which provided fodder for Anne’s enemies to paint a picture of her as shrewish, Henry as either hen-pecked or philandering depending on the weather, and the relationship tottering.

It was largely propaganda. If you put all the documentation of the “thousand days” that Henry and Anne were married in chronological order–—the letters, the gossip, the various ambassadors’ reports—it’s a script with a gaping hole if what you think you are reading is a love story in which declining passion and jealousy play the major role. For there is no evidence that either of these, although they may have contributed, was the tipping point that turned Anne’s fate around. What turned the cherished, hotly pursued consort into the lady in the tower, awaiting her execution, did not belong primarily to the realm of emotions, but to the gathering of a “perfect storm” of political, personal, and biological events, the absence of any one of which might have resulted in things turning out very differently for Anne.

As September 1533 approached, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn expected that a prince would soon be born. Announcements of a prince’s arrival were drawn up ahead of time, but an extra “s” had to be added to Elizabeth’s birth announcement to proclaim the birth of a princess. Henry’s confidence was based on no less than an astrologer’s prediction that Anne would, in fact, give birth to a male child. Would either Henry or Anne have had any reason to doubt such a prediction?

Then, as now, astrologers were proven wrong. Fast-forward to daughter Elizabeth’s reign, and we can see how predictions by Nostradamus failed. Although he is popularly featured on History Channel documentaries today, many of Nostradamus’s predictions concerning Elizabeth failed to come true. His predictions, however, served a purpose: as Catherine de Medici’s astrologer, it was his job to develop predictions that suggested the downfall of her Tudor rival. Obviously, none of the dire predictions came true, but an early modern astrologer was as much a propagandist as he was a predictor of the future. Oftentimes, propaganda was more useful than a correct prediction, as it inspired well-timed fear in the enemy and hope amongst allies. Of course, the more accurate one’s astrologer was at making predictions, the more useful the propaganda was, but the creation of fear was a tremendous boon on its own account.

This is not to say that monarchs did not take their astrologer’s predictions to heart. That would be a mistake, and one that is easy to make in a modern era where astrology is often viewed as trickery. Astrology was not a con, nor was it incompatible with religion in the 16th century. Indeed, it was considered to be a way to understand God’s divine plan, and was viewed to be as grounded in science as that of the study of the changing seasons. For Henry and Anne, the astrologer’s prediction of a male child was one they could look favorably on.

That the astrologer predicted a boy should not have surprised Henry, Anne, or us – beyond the fact that the royal couple hoped for this prediction, the months that Henry persisted in the belief that a boy would be born was enough to buy him time and leverage with those he dealt with. It gave his proceedings against Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne justification – any male (and the majority of females, too) in the early modern era would tell you that it was better to have a boy than it was to have a girl. They understood the urgency that accompanied the Tudor dynasty’s need for a male heir- and it was an urgency that had been granted a favorable verdict to the male party for generations before Henry VIII hit the scene. Read Chapuy’s or any other enemy’s report of Elizabeth’s arrival and the relief seems to drip from the pages – Henry has had another girl. Sure, the kid is healthy and this could indicate future healthy children will follow, but for now, it should be back to business as usual. Predictions could be made, but immediate results needed to follow.